“I’m not. Which is why Adrian owed me a job. Where I’d prefer a little less Nora inmylife too.”
Teagan looked at his sister. “It’s up to Sloane.”
Sloane gave an aggressive thumbs-up as her lips twitched into a smirk. Teagan supposed Nora had that coming to her.
Rose nodded, slightly mollified by Sloane’s agreement. “I’ll call you Monday.” She turned to leave, then halted again. She scanned the living room. An otter skittered out from behind the kitchen island, one of its siblings in hot pursuit.
Rose lifted her eyebrows but did not comment on the chase.
“You’re okay, then? You’re going to be okay?” she finally asked, eyes flicking to Teagan’s face.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Teagan said, discovering after he said the words that, for once, he actually meant it. “I’m great. We’re just hanging out and doing a couple of errands today. Probably going to grill some veggies out by the pool later.”
“That’s good,” Rose said, looking like she actually meant it too. She turned her head to nod farewell to Darcy, then Sloane. “Just having a family weekend in, then? Must be nice.” Her face was slightly envious.
Sloane turned the volume back up on the television. It was time for another survivable gun battle on her program, it seemed. Darcy hit the blender button to pulse the tuna one more time. Somewhere, an otter had caught scent of the fish and was starting to chirp for food.
“Yeah,” Teagan said. “It is.”
thirty
“How about this one?” Sloane asked, passing her phone back to Kristin, who sat at the other end of the gray corduroy sofa that dominated the living room of the small house Kristin shared with her mother in Bozeman.
Darcy and Sloane had been in Montana for the past two days to retrieve Darcy’s car from the tow lot and get it titled in her name. The quarters were close, and Darcy had been a little concerned that Kristin and Sloane would fight, as Sloane was not very used to even a temporary living situation where she was expected to clean up after herself, make her own food, and scrub her own bathroom sink.
But Sloane and Kristin didn’t fight. Instead, they argued. They’d argued for two days straight about Darcy’s wedding, even though Darcy had repeatedly told them that Teagan was going to have to come up with a ring and a less terror-stricken kind of proposal if he hoped to secure her hand in matrimony someday. On the third round ofwho should be maid of honor, Darcy had threatened to elope without either of them in the event she did get properly engaged. After a few moments of shocked, wounded silence, the two other women had moved seamlessly to arguing about Darcy and Teagan’s new dog.
Darcy and Teagan were going to get a dog together. It was the first thing Teagan had asked her for, after a big wind-up of a speech about how quiet the house seemed without the otters. Darcy had been half convinced he was about to ask her to get with child. A dog was an easy yes.
“ ‘Tater Tot is a six-year-old Lhasa apso-poodle mix. He takes twice-daily thyroid medication and is allergic to chicken and beef,’ ” Kristin read out loud. “I don’t think so. Four references required. No.”
Darcy pulled out her earbuds and paused Teagan’s dictation of a handout on Fisheries and Wildlife Science 302: Systematics of Birds. “I have references,” she protested out of sheer principle, even though she was only half listening to the other women’s conversation.
For the first time, Darcy was fairly certain she could pass the scrutiny of the most discerning no-kill shelter. She had a permanent address at a tidy little two-bedroom home in Beacon with a fenced backyard, and Teagan certainly had the financial resources to support even a dog who ate nothing but forty-two-dollars-a-bag prescription kibble.
“Forget this prissy little thing,” Kristin scoffed, turning the screen to flash a fat, fluffy white creature at her. “His beauty routine is probably longer than mine, and it takes four hours to dye my hair. No. You want a real dog. There’s a nice big Pyrenees mix up in Helena—”
Sloane immediately squawked in disapproval of the idea of a weeklong trip back to New York with a hundred-pound dog, and Kristin protectively hunched over the phone, scrolling through the adoption app with all the furtive, judgmental confidence of a married man browsing Tinder.
“We’re not getting a dog in Montana,” Darcy said to put an end to the burgeoning dispute. She had her eye on apurebred Labrador rescue back in New York whose profile suggested, in so many coded words, that he would turn his home to rubble if he didn’t get hours of exercise every day. But Teagan didn’t start his new swim coach gig at the middle school down the street for another month, so they were waiting on the bring-your-pet-to-work policy to make a final decision. “Besides, there’s barely going to be room for the three of us and all Sloane’s luggage as it is,” Darcy added, nodding out the window at her car.
“I’m not that bad,” Sloane protested. “You should see how Teagan packs. Like he’s worried he’s going to spill tomato soup on himself twice every single day that we’re gone.”
“WhereisTeagan?” Kristin asked, lifting her head again. “I thought his flight got in a while ago? Didn’t you want to leave before noon?”
Darcy had been wondering that herself, but she didn’t have to check her phone to answer, because she heard a taxi crunching the gravel at the end of Kristin’s drive. She grinned and went to stand in the doorway. Kristin said it had snowed last week, but today was a beautiful, golden fall day in Bozeman, and the front door was open to allow Kristin’s five cats access to the great outdoors and its hapless migratory bird population.
This was her favorite time of year in the Gallatin range. Frost in the morning, then enough sunshine to toast her cheeks in the afternoon. Darcy crossed her arms as the taxi parked next to her car.
Teagan’s smile was a little abashed as he stepped out of the taxi, and Darcy guessed that the reason for it was the many plastic sacks of groceries Darcy could see crowding the back seat.
“So I stopped by Costco,” he began to explain both histardiness and the groceries, but he didn’t finish his sentence, because Darcy closed the distance between them at a sprint, put both palms flat on his shoulders, and used the leverage to propel herself up and into his arms.
She heard the grocery sacks hit the gravel just in time for Teagan to wrap his hands under her ass and catch her as she wrapped her legs around him. His knees sagged a little, but he kept his balance.
“Hi,” Darcy said, locking her ankles behind his back and arms around his neck.
Teagan’s smile was still crooked but sweet as honey as he took a quick half step back against the taxi to avoid dropping her. “Hi, Darcy,” he said.
